Tomorrow's Oregonian will report that Multnomah County processes ordinary traffic tickets more slowly than (probably) any other jurisdiction in the West. If you receive a speeding ticket in Multnomah County and request a trial, your trial will likely be set six to eight months out. Why is the backlog so high?
Two reasons: first is that the county courts are overburdened and underfunded (as is so much else), and traffic tickets have almost the lowest priority for trial time. Second is that last year's legislature raised the fine for speeding from the mid-$200s to the mid-$400s and took away much of the court's discretion to cut the fine. Formerly, the judge could cut the ticket in half, without a trial. Now the court can reduce the ticket by only a quarter.
[When I received my only (so far) speeding ticket, so long ago that it was a comparatively paltry $110, the state trooper helpfully told me that if I sent in the fine with a polite letter of apology and offered even the barest excuse, the court would send me back half of the fine. That's what I did, and that's what the court did. No longer.]
Because the tickets are again priced (if not valued) at more than courtside Trail Blazer seats, errant drivers have much more reason to fight them. It's another example of the law of unintended consequences at work: raising the fines hasn't deterred us from speeding; it's made us insist on trials.